1. Field
A method of combination therapy for prevention and/or treatment of c-Met and/or angiogenesis factor induced diseases including co-administering an angiogenesis inhibitor and an anti-c-Met antibody or an antigen-binding fragment thereof to a patient in need thereof is provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
c-Met, a typical receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) present at the surface of cells, binds to its ligand, hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) to promote intracellular signal transduction thereby not only promoting the growth of cells but also being over-expressed in cancer cells so that it is widely implicated in cancer incidence, cancer metastasis, cancer cell migration, cancer cell penetration, angiogenesis, etc. c-Met is over-expressed in many kinds of cancers and in particular, most of the patients with over-expressed c-Met tend to have poor prognosis.
Angiogenesis inhibitors refer to any drugs designed to suppress the growth of cancer by blocking blood supply into cancer cells, and typical examples thereof may include a vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF) antagonist (inhibitor). The vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF) is also present in normal cells and in particular, it is secreted from cancer cells and binds to its receptor, VEGFR to induce angiogenesis, through which the cancer cells are provided with nutrients necessary for their growth.
Therefore, both of c-Met and VEGF related to angiogenesis are of great importance as a target in developing anticancer drugs.
Up to now, however, there haven't been suggested any technologies of treating cancer by concurrently administering a medicine having c-Met as its target and a medicine having angiogenesis factors (e.g., VEGF) as its target.